Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

Reuters covered the day-to-day bloodshed and killing, but we failed to give the proper context that would allow readers to understand what was going on, said the former head of the Reuters bureau in Iraq, Andrew MacGregor Marshall.

Andre Vitchek:Andrew, as the former head of
Reuters in Iraq, you are perhaps now comparing how the Middle
East has been covered, to the coverage of events in this part of
the world - Southeast Asia. Could you talk about the similarities
and differences?

Andrew MacGregor Marshall: I left Reuters in
quite controversial circumstances, back in 2011, because I had
obtained a lot of documents, leaked US documents that shed light
on the monarchy and its role in Thailand’s history. And these
documents are illegal in Thailand, because you are not allowed to
tell the truth about the monarchy’s role.

To me as a journalist, it’s our duty to tell the truth. And if we
have to break the local laws to do so, we have to do that. And if
we are not willing to do it, we at least have to say in our
stories that we can’t tell the full truth, because local laws
prevent us. So I became really uneasy with Reuters’ coverage and
the whole mainstream media’s coverage of Thailand and that’s why
I left.

And this was a process that had begun, I think, in Iraq. Because
almost from the start in Iraq, Reuters and all foreign
journalists could see it was a catastrophe; it was an ill-thought
out intervention; there was massive corruption, massive
incompetence, and this fact is now so widely recognized... I
don’t think it is now even up for debate that the US and
British-led intervention in Iraq was a disaster.

We had lost six staff during my time there... They were killed;
five of them killed by the US military, allegedly by mistake, and
one killed at a checkpoint by a sectarian death squad.

I started to think: we’d sacrificed so much to be there and my
Iraqi staff especially, had sacrificed so much... and in the end,
when I looked back, had we really helped any understanding of
what happened? I don’t think we did. Every day we’d focus on the
latest car bombing and the number of dead... and the number of
dead became almost incomprehensible; you’d have 80 dead in car
bombings in one day, you’d have 50 headless corpses dumped in the
street in Baghdad... So it was a constant stream of horror that
was making our headlines...

But I don’t think that readers can really understand that kind of
coverage. Certainly me, now, even though I know what a car bomb
looks like, and I know what mass killing looks like, because I’ve
seen it; when I read about Syria, for example, I find it very
hard to process this information: it’s just blood and gore,
without the context. And I came to believe that what we’d done in
Iraq had been fairly useless, because we covered the day-to-day
bloodshed and killing, but we failed to give the proper context
that would allow readers to understand what was going on. It was
almost like bloodthirsty entertainment. It makes headlines, but I
don’t think mainstream media coverage of these conflicts really
produces understanding. In fact I say it does the opposite, it
prevents understanding. There is a focus on blood and gore and
there is no attempt to really explain what the geopolitical
forces behind it are.

AV:Was it designed like this? Of course
Reuters is not the only media outlet, the only agency, which has
adopted this approach...

AM: I don’t think it’s so much an obvious
conspiracy. It’s just the debate is framed in a way that it
delegitimizes opposing viewpoints. I have been a member of the
mainstream media for 17 years of my career, and I believed I was
doing good, nobody ever told me I should follow a certain
political line and certainly nobody ever told me that I should
lie, and if they ever had I would refuse. I think most of my
colleagues in the mainstream media are similar.

But what was interesting is that it’s more insidious than that.
There is a certain discourse that becomes normalized, in which
certain views are acceptable and others not. And if you make
obvious statements, you know, like about the role of banks or
global superpowers, and about the disaster that’s befallen the
world in many areas in recent years, you are often marginalized
as some sort of loony figure. And there is a “cult of
moderation,” of being “neutral”’ in the media.
Being neutral is normally held to be that if there is a crazy
right-winger or left-winger, you are somewhere in the middle. But
obviously, truth is not always in the middle. We may not always
know the truth, but there is objective truth. And it does not
always lie in the middle between the two extremes.

I think it is through this process that the mainstream media
basically becomes a tool of misinforming people, rather than
informing people. It’s not so much deliberate lies, although some
clearly do engage in deliberate lies, but it’s just the sense
that there are some things that are safe to say that we become
conditioned that they are safe to say, and there are other things
that we probably know them to be true, but if we say them we are
mocked or delegitimized.

So the conversation is channeled quite subtly, in a way that
deviates from the truth.

‘We saw torture become normalized in Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib and
Bagram’

AV:Is there a self-censorship?

AM: Absolutely! I mean, in Thailand, which is
now my main area of expertise, there is clearly self-censorship,
because there is a law, the lèse-majesté law that forbids
discussion of the monarchy.

But more subtly, when I was covering Iraq, I used to get stories
all the time, of US troops involved in rapes and theft... I also
had three of my own staff who were tortured and sexually abused
by US troops, prior to Abu-Ghraib. I was stunned when I heard
about the sexual abuse...

AV:Men or women?

AM: Men. But this was actually a systematic
policy, I think. It has been well documented by now. The US
narrative that Abu-Ghraib was just a few bad people, who did
things that were not allowed, is ridiculous. We have seen
Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib and Bagram, and many other US detention
centers. We have seen torture, and sexual torture became
normalized. But when I was trying to report any story like this
for Reuters, my editors would demand enormous evidence. I had to
jump over innumerable hurdles to prove that my staff had been
tortured. And I knew these men very well and I knew they were
telling me the truth.

But if we wanted to report on atrocities by a militant group in
Baqubah or Fallujah, we would just write “that it had been
reported,” and there would be no attempt to ask us to prove
what happened, because it was just assumed that this is what the
militants do – they do bad things, and the Westerners do good
things. So the standard of proof was totally different. It was
done in a subtle way. We were never told to lie, and we were
genuinely always trying to tell the truth. But looking back I can
see we were coming from very constrained cultural lands, for we
looked at things with a certain mindset and we failed to
understand that most Iraqis and indeed most of the people in the
Middle East and around the world, they don’t look at the world
from a Western or US-centric mindset.

'Iraq changed me forever'

AV:Of course the perks are quite good, too.
People working for Western corporate news agencies or the
newspapers and television channels, are very well paid. It is
always quite a big risk to go against the mainstream narrative,
because the journalists can lose all these perks in an
instant.

AM: I think it is more insidious than that. I
don’t think it is actually about people fearing that they will
lose their job if they say the wrong thing. I think it is... I am
a British journalist, and I worked for a British-American
company. I was working in the Middle East and Asia, where many
people have a very different view of the world. But I was
bringing along my own preconceptions, and my company’s
preconceptions. So we didn’t properly understand that most Iraqis
or most Thais or most Iranians see the world in a very different
way. And they didn’t see the Westerners as the good guys. So I
think that there is tendency for the Western media to claim that
it is neutral and unbiased, when in fact it’s clearly propagating
a one-sided, quiet nationalistic and selfish view of its own
interventions in these countries. If I’d ever been told by any of
my bosses to lie, I would have quit. And I ended up quitting,
because I was told to lie about Thailand. But it’s done more
subtly. If you want to accuse the US military of an atrocity, you
have to make sure that every last element of your story is
absolutely accurate, because if you make one mistake, you will be
vilified and your career will be over. And we have seen that
happen to some people in recent years. But if you want to say
that some group of militants in Yemen or Afghanistan or Iraq have
committed an atrocity, your story might be completely wrong, but
nobody will vilify you and nobody will ever really check it out.

AV:Andrew, how horrible was Iraq? You were
there; you witnessed atrocities committed by the West, by the
United States... How bad was it really? Perhaps more than a
million people died?

AM: Yes.

AV: ... Before the invasion and after the
invasion...

AM: It was a shocking time. It changed me
forever. These kinds of times change anybody. Of course the
people that are most changed and traumatized are the national
populations who are involved. But it was the first time that I
was exposed to the extreme violence that became
“normal,” where every day there were corpses on the
street. Every day there were bombings, and it’s a terrible thing
when the car bombings, decapitations, and torture become routine.
And the danger of it is that the readership or the audience for
this news becomes desensitized... And to some extent I am
desensitized now by the coverage of Syria. I think one of the
challenges for journalists and filmmakers is to find a way to
engage the audience, because people don’t want to be depressed by
pictures of bloodshed and horrors... But they need to be aware of
it.

AV:So when their governments commit
atrocities in their name and in the name of their cultures, you
think we should be sensitive to the viewers who elect these
governments?

AM: No, I don’t believe we should be sensitive,
but we need to find a way to engage the audience. A complaint
that I often hear from journalists, including me sometimes, is
that the audience wants to click on a story about Paris Hilton,
but not on a story about car bombing in Syria... and I think,
that’s human nature. People do want to often avoid unpleasant
news. And they often do want to read celebrity froth.

AV:And they want to avoid responsibility,
very often...

AM: Partly. But they also don’t want to depress
themselves.

I think it is our responsibility to dig deeper and talk about
causes. Why are these conflicts happening? So rather than focus
on the froth and the atrocities, and the horror on the top, which
are important, we have to also try and provide the framework that
allows people to understand why this is happening.

AV:You are talking about philosophical
journalism, which was practiced by great writers like Burchett,
Kapuściński, Orwell... But this sort of journalism seems to be
dying, unfortunately.

AM: It seems to be dying in the mainstream
media, but my impression is that in the new media, on-line, there
is a much greater appetite for this.

AV:Andrew, where is Iraq going?

AM: Well, as you know, Iraq is falling apart.
The Kurds will probably have their own state, which they probably
deserve, because their people have been stateless for so many
years. But what we are seeing is a much wider Shia versus Sunni
conflict, across the Middle East, in which Saudi Arabia in
particular, and also the Gulf countries, are playing a baleful
role. And we see the tentacles of this spreading much further,
even into Indonesia and Malaysia.

Iraq is an artificial country that was created by the British by
cobbling together various groups that don’t really want to live
together. And like so much else in the Middle East, it’s
unraveling and it’s proven to be a disaster. So it is an
unfolding tragedy. We cannot look at what’s happening in Iraq
without looking at the wider Middle East context, which is also
an unfolding tragedy, and I think it could well be the defining
conflict for our era.

The discussion took
place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in early August 2014

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.